The War at Home:
The Domestic Costs of Bush's Militarism, by Frances Fox Piven

reviewed byGeoffrey Kurtz

I

mperialism
used to be a theory; today, it is a rhetoric. The word
shadows us wherever we go: on placards at anti-war
demonstrations, sprinkled through the pages of left
publications, and sprouting up in one conversation after
another. Few seem to have noticed that the word has left
behind the precise meanings it had several decades ago; it
seems to have become more a token of radicalism than a tool
of critical analysis. The question needs to be asked: Is the
concept of imperialism useful today? In taking account of
what she calls “the domestic political dynamics that
accompanied America’s unilateral turn toward preemptive
war,” Frances Fox Piven addresses this question.

For J.A.
Hobson and Vladimir Lenin—the authors of the classic works
on imperialism—the term denoted a global pattern of
intertwined economic and political domination by a few
wealthy nations.[1]
For Hobson, imperialism was a policy sought by certain
“parasitical” sectors of capital. Because they needed new
sites for exporting surplus, these capitalists wanted their
governments to acquire and defend colonies. Lenin argued, to
the contrary, that imperialism was not an optional policy
but a structural necessity within the new finance-dominated
form of capitalism. The debate between proponents of the two
theories, correlated as it is with the conflict between
reformist and revolutionary socialisms, has obscured what
the theories have in common. However, their similarity may,
today, be more important than their differences. Hobson and
Lenin agreed that capital’s needs beyond the borders
of its home countries drove colonialism, which in turn
brought wars. International economics and international
politics were joined by a tight bond—in Lenin’s view,
inevitably, and in Hobson’s, for as long as pro-colonialist
sectors of capital were able to shape policy to their own
liking. For both theories, thus, the globalizing interests
of capital drove colonialism and war-making.

Piven
quietly sets aside the idea that capital’s push for colonial
expansion is the central cause of international conflict
today. She writes:

Explanations focusing
on imperialism assume the main reason for war in Iraq was to
shore up American domination abroad. I argue that another
reason for war was to shore up America’s rulers at home….[W]ith
the political lift gained by war-making, the Bush regime was
also able to push rapidly ahead with its right wing domestic
policy agenda [of] extracting wealth from the American
people.

To say there
is “another reason for war” is to make an amendment that
collapses the old theories of imperialism. The story Piven
tells is one in which—at least in the case of President
George W. Bush’s war in Iraq—elites seek war because
militarist policies facilitate capital’s power at home. In
Piven’s account, the new American colonialism is simply the
price of war, not the structural imperative behind it. If
Piven is right, the link between war and the interests of
capital is far more indirect and circumstantial than
Hobson’s and Lenin’s theories of imperialism would have us
expect. Capitalism and colonialism, rather than forming a
seamless whole, happen to coincide for the United States at
the moment, and there is no particular reason to expect they
will do so regularly or for long at a time.

Piven notes
that war “always has a home front.” Wars have consequences
for those whose countries fight them, even when the wars are
abroad, and war’s domestic constituents and opponents
contend with each other about those consequences. In this
book, she traces the domestic political consequences of the
war in Iraq: those that we can see already, as well as
others, vastly different, that might emerge in the near or
nearish future.

The
immediate consequence of the Iraq war for American politics,
Piven argues, has been a swelling of nationalism and
authority-worship centered on the person of President Bush,
an “emotional fervor” that “smoothed the way for huge
advances in the domestic neo-conservative agenda.” If we can
presume that Bush and his advisors anticipated this upswing
in their level of popular support—which seems
reasonable—then we can see the Iraq war as a domestic “power
strategy” on the part of the administration and its allies,
a move that has aided the administration’s base of the haves
and have-mores in their mission of “extracting wealth from
the American people,” Piven writes.

Note that
for Piven the relevant attribute of capital in this context
is not its drive for foreign markets or resources, but its
more fundamental need to secure its power in relation to its
domestic working class, the better to generate profits. In
any contemporary advanced capitalist country, this means
rolling back the achievements of social democratic, liberal,
and labor movements. The familiar neo-conservative agenda
follows: cutting taxes on profits and on the income and
assets of the wealthy, undercutting social welfare programs
both fiscally and politically, providing tax-funded
giveaways to corporations, and deregulating industries. The
bulk of Piven’s book is a careful—even exhausting—recounting
of the Bush administration’s pursuit of this agenda.

Piven
recounts Bush’s massive tax cuts, along with deregulatory
and corporate-welfare policies targeting not only the energy
industry—Bush’s closest corporate ally—but also the mass
media, the pharmaceutical industry, gun makers, and sugar
growers. She notes the administration’s feeble response to
the unprecedented corporate scandals of the past four years,
as well as the increased trend toward the capital-friendly
abuse of science. The heart of her story, however, is the
administration’s social policy assault on the working class
and the poor. Contemporary business elites in the US, she
notes, have three primary policy goals: reducing or even
reversing redistribution of wealth, opening up new areas for
profiteering (such as social service provision), and
weakening the buffers that protect workers from labor market
forces. This is the context in which Piven places the Bush
administration’s attacks on labor rights and social welfare
programs. The damage Bush has done, or is poised to do, is
stunning: Medicaid funding limitations, for-profit
privatization of social services, drastic cuts to low-income
housing subsidies, barriers to Earned Income Tax Credit
applications, new restrictions on eligibility for public
assistance, rollbacks of workplace safety and organizing
rights, a proposed “guest worker” program that resembles
indentured servitude without the payoff of citizenship at
the end, and continuation of the longstanding right-wing
strategy of stigmatizing welfare recipients by ensuring that
only the most socially marginal groups are eligible for
certain high-profile programs. Bush has even skimped on
funding for his signature social policy initiative:
testing-centered education reform. Lurking in the wings is
an even more radical assault on what Piven, elsewhere, has
called the American social compact, as Bush’s advisors
prepare strategies for privatizing Medicare and Social
Security—the programs that represent the most important
gestures the American government has ever made toward a
universalistic welfare state.

At times,
reading the book’s middle chapters feels like plowing
through a box of index note cards: fact after fact after
fact, at first infuriating, then dizzying, then numbing.
When you read these chapters (which you should), be careful.
Distracted readers might fail to notice that through these
patient details, Piven has captured something crucial for
anyone who seeks to understand this administration’s policy
success. The audaciousness of the Bush regime’s program lies
not only in its extent, but also in its stealth. There have
been no loud proclamations of a new policy paradigm, no
history-making neo-conservative broadcasts equivalent to
Franklin Roosevelt’s call for a “second Bill of Rights” or
Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of an “unconditional war on
poverty.” Instead, Piven observes, the Bush administration
has announced policy shifts at times unlikely to get press
attention, said one thing and done another, chipped steadily
at the welfare state rather than blasting it suddenly.

The Bush
regime’s quiet persistence in demolishing social welfare
programs—as well as what Piven calls the “crusading
harshness” that seems to be its animating spirit—is perhaps
best illustrated by an example that, Piven comments,
represents the administration at its most “gratuitously
mean-spirited”:

In his 2003 State of Union message, the president
boasted of a new $450 million program for mentoring the
children of prisoners. His budget proposals shortly
afterwards allocated $150 million, and also eliminated a
number of other programs that reached those same children,
with the result that there was an overall reduction of $39
million. And…the 2004 budget proposed to reduce other
after-school services for children by $400 million.

Who are
these guys?

The Bush
regime’s power rests on the continued unity of the various
Republican constituencies: “evangelists, antitax groups,
pro-business interests, libertarians, antilabor groups, and
gun enthusiasts” along with the “military-industrial
establishment.” The bond that unites Pentagon and
military-industry elites, corporate interests, and the
grassroots footsoldiers of the right, Piven proposes, is the
ideological clarity delivered by neo-conservative thinkers.
The neo-conservative intellectuals, from their posts in the
think tanks and publications allied with the Republican
Party—and, now, from within the Bush administration—have
promulgated a ready-made justification for the militarist
foreign policy that, in turn, provides the political cover
for the right’s domestic agenda and electoral success.
Pentagon pragmatists and bottom-line capitalists might not
share the neo-cons’ confidence in preemptive attacks or
their enthusiasm for the military introduction of liberal
democracy to the Arab world, but this does not matter.
Policies need public rationales, and if the case for war in
Iraq prepared by the likes of Richard Perle and Paul
Wolfowitz had not existed, someone would have had to invent
it.

Neo-conservative ideology has not only helped to hold
together the Republican base, Piven writes. It has also
“recast the president and his party as the anointed saviors
of America at war.” In the aftermath of the September 11
attacks, Bush’s combination of religious rhetoric, military
bravado, and appeals to Americans’ latent hunger for
authority has proven powerful. This mix of themes has taken
President Bush from being a weak and flailing executive to
being re-elected with more votes than any other candidate
for President has ever received.

The catch,
for President Bush and his constituents, is that their use
of the Iraq war to underpin a pro-capital policy offensive
may generate its own collapse. Bush’s simultaneous pursuit
of war and new benefits for elites, Piven writes, “violates
the lessons of history.” Wars, she notes, tend to become
less popular with the fading of the nationalistic fervor
they spark at first, and political elites find they must
compensate for this somehow. Thus, working-class and left
movements have often won major political and economic
concessions from elites during or immediately following
wars. The voting franchise was expanded in Britain towards
the end of World War I and in the US, for 18-20 year olds,
during the Vietnam War. World War II saw 90 percent tax
rates on the rich in the US and, after the war, the
construction of Britain’s modern welfare state and the
introduction of generous veterans’ benefits in the US.
Bush’s attacks on the general welfare and on civil liberties
contradict this pattern. As US support for the war declines,
Piven suggests, Bush may yet be forced to make policy
concessions or even to face domestic regime change.
Nationalism may be war’s immediate consequence, but
discontent follows soon after, and discontent has political
consequences of its own.

Statisticians may question whether Piven’s examples indicate
a significant correlation between war and rights-expansions,
but this would be missing her point. Piven’s argument is not
that wars automatically lead to greater political and
economic rights for working people, but that wars create
political openings for those who would push for such rights.
Piven’s analysis of the 2004 presidential election campaign
as a tug-of-war between Americans’ desire for greater
economic equality and their enthusiasm for military
nationalism rings true. That war beat economics on November
2, however, does not mean it will continue to do so. While
stronger Republican control of Congress and a perpetually
complacent mass media make it no more likely than before
that the administration’s actions will be subject to intense
formal scrutiny, it nevertheless becomes increasingly hard
for anyone to ignore the failure of Bush’s foreign policy.
Iraq becomes bloodier by the day, and an Iran-like
constitutional theocracy now is among the best
foreseeable scenarios there. Still, Bush’s “war president”
glow has not yet dimmed enough to bring about his defeat.
While cultural conservatism played a significant role in the
2004 election, evidence is mounting that Bush’s image as a
strong commander in chief mattered more.[2]
Many voters chose Bush because they still saw the Iraq war
as the decision of a bold leader, and as part of a larger
“war on terrorism” crucial to American security. Prospects
for regime change at home—or at least for squeezing some
concessions from the Bush administration—seem to rest on
whether and when economic discontent can overcome wartime
nationalistic support for the President.

The
questions that emerge from Piven’s argument, thus, begin
with: Who will raise demands for economic equality?
Piven underlines the notion that left movements “cannot
flourish without Democrats in power,” since movements’
capacity for shaking up the status quo is muted when the
governing party feels free to ignore them. But this is an
argument about the conditions under which left movements can
win major victories—not about the conditions under which
they can orient themselves and begin to grow. Piven implies
that left movements in the US must continue to press their
economic demands and must continue to link those demands to
electoral politics, aiming at an end to the current
Republican regime. As she aptly notes, there are “no
promises for our political future.” Still, Piven makes an
important contribution to post-election left strategies by
pointing out the gap between Bush’s wartime policies and the
historical precedents, and by identifying this gap as the
administration’s greatest area of vulnerability.

Piven’s
other contribution in this book is to question how closely
international politics and capital’s global interests are
intertwined. By making a strong argument for the central
importance of domestic politics in shaping the Iraq war, she
refutes the idea that either of the classic theories of
imperialism might be sufficient to explain that war—and
leaves open the possibility that they may not be useful at
all. If the old theories of imperialism no longer have
purchase in explaining war, perhaps we should dispense with
both the theory and rhetoric of anti-imperialism. Thinking
past old theories of imperialism would force people on the
left to re-examine when and why we are anti-war, as well as
what we want to do about wars we oppose. Since Hobson’s and
Lenin’s theories of imperialism saw a link between
globalized capitalism and war, they implied an anti-war
politics that had socialism at its heart and a socialist
politics that was necessarily anti-war. In contrast, Piven’s
alternative to anti-imperialist theory suggests a connection
between anti-war movements and the politics of economic
equality as contingent as that between war and capitalist
interests, one that has to do with the relationships of both
to domestic social policy, not with direct causal ties
between international economic and political dynamics. A
left that takes Piven’s arguments to heart will recognize
that opposing wars like that in Iraq entails fighting “the
war at home.”

An American
left that emphasizes domestic needs over foreign
entanglements, of course, risks turning toward isolationism.
To move in that direction would be a betrayal of humanist
values and is, I am sure, far from what Piven herself has in
mind. If Piven’s argument is right, however, the
internationalism contemporary anti-war and anti-colonialist
movements need can not be predicated on anti-imperialism.
When ideas about structural imperatives have been
discredited, what do we have left but raw principles? As
much as we need a domestic politics that seeks to advance
what Karl Marx called “the political economy of the working
class,” perhaps we need a left foreign policy that owes less
to Hobson and Lenin—and Marx—and more to Immanuel Kant and
Thomas Paine.